


The Finer Things

by K_dAzrael



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Blood, Desert Bluffs, Diego the Strex Scientist - Freeform, Dominance, Lingerie, M/M, Power Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-02-03 01:06:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1725572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/K_dAzrael/pseuds/K_dAzrael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Hello there – I’m Kevin," he says, peeling himself off the carpet. He’s wearing a tie and a shirt but it’s difficult to guess the original colour of either. There is void where his eyes should be and when he smiles his top teeth are sharp, the bottom ones oddly angled and spaced. Diego feels a deep stirring of something in his solar plexus. He cannot say whether it is nausea or desire, and that concerns him, because those two sensations ought not to be confusable, yet this sort of thing has been happening to him more and more since he moved to Desert Bluffs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Finer Things

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Все самое лучшее](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3618270) by [Singh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Singh/pseuds/Singh)



> I meant my first fic in this fandom to be something cuter and fluffier, but then I had to go and get obsessed with Kevin. [Videntefernandez’s](http://videntefernandez.tumblr.com/) drawings of her Desert Bluffs double of Carlos, Diego, did something to me (especially the ones of him in lingerie). SORRY, I AM A BAD PERSON.

On the day he is seconded to the project in Desert Bluffs, Diego steps from a yellow helicopter into the stifling dry heat, then to the back seat of a black sedan. The car’s radio springs into life with the ignition, and Kevin’s peppy, propagandist tones came across bright and clear. Listening to his show that day, Diego himself could almost believe in the existence of a smiling god behind the logo.

Diego leans forwards and presses the intercom button that connects him with the chauffeur. “Where did they get the radio host?” His team have been updating the vocal software of the Mark III bioforms, but they’re still a long way from sounding this fluent or enthusiastic. 

“He’s a local, I think. A real gift, the guys in marketing have been saying.”

“I bet,” Diego replies. The whole town is a gift to Strexcorp – Desert Bluffs is a repository of a number of invaluable resources, not least of which is its unusually suggestible population, so well accustomed to horror and random, inexplicable violence. “It’s almost like this town was made for us.” 

“Or us for it,” the chauffeur muses in a dark, absent sort of voice.

“And now... the weather,” trills Kevin across the airwaves. Diego finds he doesn’t even question it when the promised meteorological information is replaced with a song. His reports tell him it is always sunny in the Bluffs. 

*~*~*

One year later, Diego finds the radio station oddly quiet and empty as he makes his way down corridors lit with green LEDs. The studio, when he locates it, is the scene of some recent slaughter, the carpet swampy with fresh blood. 

Well, that explains the missing interns, he thinks, making a note of it in one of the spreadsheets on his tablet computer. 

“What a beautiful soul,” Kevin says. Diego did not notice him at first, but he’s lying on the floor, partially obscured by the desk.

“Thanks,” Diego replies, rocking back on one heel. “They’re Louboutin.”

Kevin laughs, as if Diego has said something witty and delightful. “Oh, now where are my manners? Hello there – I’m Kevin,” he says, peeling himself off the carpet. He’s wearing a tie and a shirt but it’s difficult to guess the original colour of either. There is void where his eyes should be and when he smiles his top teeth are sharp, the bottom ones oddly angled and spaced. Diego feels a deep stirring of something in his solar plexus. He cannot say whether it is nausea or desire, and that concerns him, because those two sensations ought not to be confusable, yet this sort of thing has been happening to him more and more since he moved to this town. 

“Diego.” 

“Oh!” Kevin says, clenching and unclenching his hands in apparent excitement. “O-oh! You’re head of Strexcorp R&D.”

“That is correct.” Diego tries to breathe and think and the stirring comes again – something about the narrow face so animated with savage enjoyment draws him and he is suffused with a powerful – as yet unfocused – want.

Kevin sits in his chair, pushing the microphone aside. “Forgive me, friend, for not recognising you, but I was always told that scientists wear lab coats.”

“I’m an unconventional scientist,” Diego says, unbuttoning his dark chalk-stripe suit jacket one-handed. 

“Oh, how so?”

There are a lot of answers to that question, and most of them would begin with his lack of such cumbersome inhibitions as _ethics_ and _integrity_ , but that is not what Diego thinks of. He thinks of how all the other members of the first wave team are dead – a bunch of middle-class introverts who never had an original thought or a glimpse of intuition. Intuition is what has always kept Diego alive, and it is what holds him here now, staring at this walking atrocity that represents something – he’s not quite sure what yet, but something vital and important. 

Instead he answers, glibly: “I delegate a lot, but I see you prefer the hands-on approach.”

Kevin giggles, tenting his fingers together. His arms are caked in dried blood up to the elbows. “Some people like their workspaces to be impersonal – not me, though. Now, what can I do for you – for Strexcorp – today?”

“We want your assistance in a recruitment drive for test subjects, but let’s talk about that later. Have you had lunch yet, Kevin?”

Kevin makes a regretful moue and glances at what is presumably a watch, under all the hair and gore. “Oh, I don’t think I can leave my desk today. I still have to make up for those twenty minutes I spent hunting down Intern Paul earlier – so uncooperative! You know, some young people just don’t want to help their community, don’t you think? So sad.” 

“Any meeting you have with me is on company time, Kevin.” Diego tilts his head towards the door. “Shall we?”

*~*~*

Everything Kevin touches gets smeared the colour of rust. The upholstery in the car may never be the same. Sitting next to him in the backseat brings back the strongest sense-memory in Diego – the sawdust, iron and rot smell of his uncle’s butcher shop in Queens. It was horrendous in the summer, until something changed in his sinuses, or in his brain maybe, and all of a sudden he could bear it. 

Diego steps out onto the pavement and waits for Kevin to join him. Kevin is medium height and build and Diego towers over him in his skyscraper heels. There’s a patch of unbloodied fabric at the small of his back and it is tantalizingly sweat-damp when Diego puts his hand to it and urges Kevin along with him through the doorway of the restaurant.

The staff of _Guilt_ know him on sight, and if they think anything about the state of his companion they say nothing about it, conducting Kevin to his chair with deference and laying a napkin of oyster-coloured linen on his lap. He refuses a menu when it’s offered to him.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s good?” he says to Diego.

Diego feels his pulse spike at that. He does so very much enjoy spoiling his partners – though the line between that and controlling has never been very clear or important to him.

“Bring him a whole steamed lobster,” he says, “And a glass of the verdicchio, very cold. Bring me a single-malt scotch on the rocks.”

“Oh, you’re not having anything to eat?” the camp lilt to Kevin’s voice is the same as on the radio, and the contrast with that and his appearance is oddly compelling.

“I don’t eat after midday,” Diego tells him, threading his gold-ringed fingers together on the table. “It damages my productivity.”

“Oh?” Kevin tears apart a bread roll with his fingers, which look like they must be preternaturally strong. “I’m always starving. My mother used to say I was just a bottomless pit.” He laughs gaily. “Well, you know how teenagers are – with all their newly awakened appetites and sprouting hair and poison quills.”

“I can imagine,” Diego says, though he can’t. Those native to the Bluffs all have something faintly inhuman about them – his tests so far are inconclusive, so he has not been able to work out if it’s genetic or environmental, or something of both. He wonders sometimes if it isn’t getting into him too – he didn’t always wear stilettos in public, or carry a gold-plated Beretta snug against his hip. His memory wasn’t always so full of ellipses – or was it? 

When Kevin’s food arrives he eschews the dainty silver claw cracker in favour of his own fingernails and teeth. There is something about the way he chews and sucks the meal that makes Diego reflect on how it is essentially a giant sea bug, just one that custom and tastes have decreed an expensive delicacy rather than a creepy abomination. Kevin eats the brain matter and the gills, and some of the thinner portions of the shell. Diego orders a second one and watches him consume that with equal gusto, before calling for a slice of the dark, rich chocolate torte.

“I’m afraid I don’t have much of a sweet tooth,” Kevin says when it is set in front of him.

“Indulge me,” Diego says, somewhere between a suggestion and a threat. Kevin glances up at him, seeming to gauge his expression, then picks up the fork and eats. Then they have tea, which Diego sends back at first because he hates the restaurant’s ugly, thick china. The maître d’ is dispatched to an antique store to buy a better set, and Diego smiles, enraptured at the vision of a translucent porcelain cup set in the cradle of Kevin’s slaughterhouse hands. 

“We didn’t talk much about business,” Kevin says as they rise from the table.

“Didn’t we?” Diego says lightly, touching his back again. “Don’t worry about that. We’ll see more of each other.”

“Oh?” 

“In fact, I want you to come over to my home this evening. I’ll send the car for you.”

Kevin blinks, the void of his eye sockets appearing and disappearing. 

“You do like me, don’t you Kevin?” Diego asks – something at the back of his mind that once might have been a conscience prompting him to confirm this before he continues.

“I sure do, Diego.”

“And we understand each other,” he says, pushing Kevin back against the side of the car with a hand on his shoulder, “don’t we?”

“I do hope so,” Kevin smiles, tilts his head up as if asking for a kiss. Diego gives it to him, deep and wet – lets him feel the deep thrumming of his strange, twisted desire.

As he pulls back he puts his large, dark hand on Kevin’s jaw. “You’ll be staying the night,” he tells him, “so bring some fresh clothes, but don’t bathe – I want to do that.”

“ _Oh_ ,” he says breathily. “Fun!”

*~*~*

Diego feels an urgent, buzzing impatience as he waits for Kevin that evening, sitting back on his Queen Anne sofa, which is upholstered in canary yellow raw silk. He nurses another scotch and has stripped down to his essentials: the heels; thigh-high sheer stockings with hold ups; briefs with a black lace panel at the front; a matching cropped camisole. He has tossed on a silk robe, too, but left it unbelted. He feels lordly and powerful like this, and he knows how he looks – toned thighs and calves prominent when he stands. Once, he thinks, dimly, a man laughed at him when he revealed what he was underneath – but that man is dead. The old Diego who could feel things like shame is also dead, all his extraneous parts and useless emotions blasted away by the desert sands.

The door opens and Kevin is shown into the apartments, looking about himself with an avid, birdlike attention, apparently unhindered from doing so by his lack of eyes. 

“Hello my darling,” Diego says. There is no point in pretense – Kevin is his darling, and he will be henceforth addressed as such.

“Oh,” Kevin says, that vibrato thrill in his voice as Diego rises to meet him. “Well look at you – I’ve never seen anything so big and lovely.”

Diego rewards the compliment with a kiss and takes Kevin by the hand into the bathroom. The big sunken marble tub is already filled, tendrils of steam drifting from the water’s surface. He helps Kevin peel off his clothes, now stiff and clinging to his body in places so the shirt has to be torn away like a band-aid. Diego hands him into the bath, then seats himself on the wide, tiled edge, unlatching his gold Rolex and setting it aside. 

He cards his fingers through Kevin’s hair and picks out small fragments lost among the matted strands: some chips of bone, a tooth, a sharp piece of lobster shell. Diego places them in an empty soap dish as if they are collectable trinkets.

Kevin rests his chin on his knees. “Why have we never met before today, Diego?”

Diego sluices water over Kevin’s back, revealing the tones of his flesh beneath. He has a pair of deep-set dimples just above his buttocks that Diego knows he will be circling with his tongue before long. 

“I’m not sure,” he muses. “I’ve only lived here for a year. We must have missed one another.”

Privately he thinks that the town designed it this way – a year ago, whoever he was then probably would have run screaming from something like Kevin. The town called him and he came; then it moulded him. Strexcorp itself was once only a run-of-the-mill business, no more nor less ruthless and aggressive in its profiteering than others of its kind. In Desert Bluffs everything warps in the heat and the relentless quantum illogic.

When the bath is finished, Kevin has left a pink tide mark all around the tub. He lets Diego chafe him dry with a big white towel and lead him into the bedroom beyond. There Diego sits on the edge of the bed and rubs him all over with a lotion scented with vanilla and cedarwood; Kevin’s flesh is strangely supple and pliable, like an infant’s. He strokes Kevin’s dick with a still-slippery hand and feels it grow hard in his grip – it is long and slender with a pronounced curve. Kevin bucks his hips and makes a wide variety of faintly inhuman yelps and growls, along with a running commentary that is by turns surreally wholesome or morbid: “oh Diego, that’s so _swell_... your skin is so soft... how many layers of skin do you think there are on a hand?” 

“Three,” he says, rubbing the pad of his thumb through the precum that has dripped onto Kevin’s stomach, and then sticking the digit in Kevin’s mouth for him to suck clean. 

“Gosh,” Kevin mumbles around it, “you are just so smart.”

Diego pulls away for a moment to lean down and slip off his shoes, the tendons straining as he lays his feet experimentally flat on the floor. The stockings are next and then the camisole, which he takes off by reaching back and tugging it forward over his head, as a man would remove a t-shirt. Kevin catches his wrist as he reaches for the waistband of his briefs and leans down to put his mouth on him through the fabric. The feeling of the heat and wetness and the faint scrape of lace against the head of his cock is amazing and he gasps and threads his fingers through Kevin’s damp hair.

They fuck with Kevin flat on his back and Diego on top. The whole day has been one long carnal act for Diego, but he does need this – the finality of that stretch and burn of taking Kevin’s dick deep inside him. They rock against each other, ungentle and without finesse; Diego grunts and lays one of his hands across Kevin’s throat, just holding, not squeezing. He briefly wonders what would happen if he jammed his thumbs into Kevin’s eye sockets and the obscenity of the thought makes arousal trickle all through his lower abdomen. Then he leans back, arms out behind him for support, rolling his hips to get more sensation – that awful, compulsive pleasure-pain like scratching a rash. One of Kevin’s legs is crooked out to the side and Diego can see he has dried blood under his toenails. God, what _is_ he?

Kevin makes another of his inhuman whimpers and twists and shudders beneath him in orgasm. Diego pulls off him and tugs insistently at his hip to flip him over onto his front, then leans a heavy hand on Kevin’s shoulder and strokes himself roughly, spilling over the shifting flesh of his back down to those two somehow obscene little divots that so transfixed him earlier. 

Coming down from orgasm, heart still thundering in his chest and all his muscles jumping like those of a racehorse, Diego feels faintly hysterical – he wants to laugh, or burst into tears, and he just can’t decide. He looks down at Kevin’s prone form and he is utterly disgusted or in love and he’s not sure which – maybe they’re not mutually exclusive anymore.

Kevin raises himself slightly on his elbows and looks back over his shoulder to where Diego is still kneeling either side of his thighs, staring down at the trail of semen decorating his back like a pearlescent tattoo. 

“Neat!” Kevin says. He is smiling, Diego thinks, though a voice in the back of his head says that isn’t what a smile is supposed to look like. 

_It is, here,_ he corrects himself, leaning down to press another kiss against sharp incisors. Kevin is his darling, after all, and Diego is going to give him everything he wants – and everything he doesn’t yet know he wants.


End file.
